Spiegel Sohmer is a firm of attorneys offering state-of-the-art expertise to a diversified business clientele seeking solutions that are innovative, concrete, and pragmatic. Our firm groups some forty five attorneys who concentrate principally within three broad specialties: business law (including Intellectual Property), tax law and litigation. Spiegel Sohmer has extensive experience representing companies at all stages of their life cycle, from start up through to exit, and also represents a wide array of investors: www.spiegelsohmer.com

Richter is, above all, a financial consulting services firm offering strategic support and has been a recognized member of the business community since 1926. Richter entire team consists of more than 450 partners, experts, high-level professionals and administrative employees. Because of this collective expertise, our firm has an unrivalled reputation and has earned the respect of the business community.

Futurpreneur Canada is the only national, non-proﬁt organization to provide ﬁnancing, mentoring, and support tools for every business stage to aspiring business owners and startup founders: www.futurpreneur.ca

Founded in 1904, Kruger Inc. is a major producer of publication papers, tissue, lumber and other wood products, corrugated cartons from recycled fibres, green and renewable energy and wines and spirits. The Company is also a leader in paper and paperboard recycling in North America. Kruger operates facilities in Quebec, Ontario, British Columbia, Newfoundland and Labrador and the United States. (www.kruger.com)

Community Partners

The National Angel Capital Organization (NACO) accelerates a thriving, early-stage investing ecosystem in Canada by connecting individuals, groups, and other partners that support Angel-stage investing. NACO provides intelligence, tools and resources for its members; facilitates key connections across networks, borders and industries; and helps to inform policy affecting the Angel asset-class.

Anges Québec’s mission is to help its angel investors make profitable investments in innovative companies in a wide range of industries and in all regions of Quebec. To this end, Anges Québec identifies the best entrepreneurs and business projects and supports the Anges Québec members who finance them.

Noticias Montrealis a Spanish-language media based in Montreal and founded by a group of immigrant journalists. Its main goal is to provide the latest news, information and features about Montreal, Quebec, Canada. NM wants to offer a helping hand in the immigration and integration process of the numerous newcomers as well as promoting the Spanish language.

La Gare is a collaborative workspace. A place to work, connect and learn in the heart of the Mile End.

Is Manual Scaling Right for You? by Jason Freedman

In a post from the 42 Floors blog, Jason Freedman, FI mentor and co-founder of 42 Floors, offers insight into his personal experience building 42 Floors from the ground up. He also suggests three basic questions startup founders should ask themselves before attempting to scale manually.

"At 42Floors, we’re trying to change the way people search for commercial real estate. It’s an enormous undertaking. Gathering commercial real estate listings data is not trivial. The data comes from many different sources, all of which must be cleaned and normalized. We sign agreements with landlords to scrape their websites. We do deals with brokerages to take feeds. We parse emails from industry distribution lists. And a half a dozen other messy methods.

So when you see a nice listing with a picture show up on 42Floors, it’s usually because of some fairly schleppy stuff we’ve done. It would seem obvious that we have to automate all of these operations and that the technology behind routing all this data, normalizing it, cleaning it and presenting it, is the core technology of the company. But what’s not obvious is just how long we’ve been able to go without building any of it.

Early on, we didn’t have website scrapers. We just hired people to manually enter each of the listings. As we started receiving inbound distribution lists by email, we didn’t immediately build our email parser to transcribe the email blasts. We just hired some people off TaskRabbit to manually go through each email blast.

And as the numbers kept growing, we kept scaling our manual processes, we worked with an offshore firm to manually enter even more data. In fact, when you look at each aspect of our operations, you will find a fairly sophisticated manual operations process predating every piece of technology that we’ve built. Our wonderful Director of Vibe, Alison, manages all these processes while she does a million other things.

So now, your turn.

Is manual scaling right for you? 3 Questions to Ask Yourself

Have you achieved product-market fit?

If the answer is no, you’re a prime target for manual scaling. In the pre-product-market fit stage, you are really just running an experiment. Anything you do that allows you to test your thesis faster is worth it—even if it means doing a bunch of manual work that will have to be replaced later.

Would outsourcing save you time?

If you have a process in your company that could be outsourced, you should. The cost of outsourced labor is so low compared to writing code, that you should almost always pursue it first. Later on, when your startup is showing great traction metrics, you’ll have more time and more money to write the automated version that will be the future of your company.

Will your users even care?

If all you’re doing is changing some back end process that doesn’t actually touch your users, they won’t care. They want their problem solved. They don’t care if it’s through beautiful code or some hacked-together manual process. If the latter is 10x faster to get to market, you should take it."

Jason Freedman is a mentor for the Silicon Valley Founder Institute and the co-founder of 42 Floors. To hear more from him, check out the 42 Floors blog and follow him on Twitter @JasonFreedman

The Founder Institute is the world's largest entrepreneur training and startup launch program, helping aspiring founders across the globe build enduring technology companies. Based in Silicon Valley and with chapters across 50 countries, the Founder Institute has helped launch over 1,563 companies in 5 years. The company's mission is to "Globalize Silicon Valley" and build sustainable startup ecosystems that will create one million new jobs worldwide.